Scratch

Scratch video owes it origins to a British video art
movement from the early to mid-1980s. It is usually characterized by the use of
found footage, often from amateur, public-domain, or historical sources, that
is packaged and combined through fast-cutting and multilayered editing
techniques. Similar to detournement, scratch video is decidedly an outsider art
genre as opposed to a mass-media archetype, and it frequently contains images
of a violent, shocking, or sexual nature.

Scratch video is usually designed as a decorative or
ambient backdrop element, sometimes referred to as video wallpaper, and, more often than not, scratch videos are intentionally
created without an included audio track or sometimes include an audio track
that is optional. The popularization of scratch video found its roots in nightclubs,
discos, and, later, raves, but, in each case, the detournement style of scratch
video acted as a backdrop to the venue in which it appeared.

The 1980s London club culture introduced a new and
exciting mixed-media environment that for the first time, incorporated video
offerings along with the standard disco strobe-light fare. One early adopter of
scratch video was the Fridge, a nightclub in the Brixton area of South London,
founded by Andrew Czezowski, who managed the legendary Roxy nightclub during
the infamous London punk years of the mid-to late 1970s. The Fridge was at the
center of the early 1980s new-romantic music movement and featured such acts as
the Pet Shop Boys, Eurythmics, and other successful bands well before they ever
became famous.

Duvet Brothers - Live Multiscreen Scratch Show

Peter Boyd Maclean, trained as a painter, and Rik Lander, a
techie video engineer—together, better known as the Duvet Brothers—were early
superstars of scratch. Their Scratching for
a New Texture, shown at the Fridge on August 11, 1984, featured music by Gang of Four, New
Order, Torch Song, and Sid Presley. The Duvet Brothers are best known for
pioneering multiscreen scratch exhibitions using between nine and twenty-five video
monitors and mixing original video with “appropriated video” shot directly off
of TV screens tuned to television broadcasts. Their work typically includes a
narrative of sorts—for example, commenting on President Ronald Reagan’s Star
Wars initiative, they combined images from Star
Wars, the movie, mixed with footage of War
Machine, a popular British program that fetishizes weaponry for interested
prime-time audiences. This might be the first video described as using “machine-gun
edits” or rapid-fire repetitive editing techniques.

Their work has appeared in more than thirty venues,
including video installations for the 1986 20th Century Fox movie Less Than Zero and the London Scratch
Video Happening at Ohio University in 1987.

The introduction of scratch video into music performances
led to many of the original MTV music-video styles and was widely adopted by such
bands as Test Dept, Nocturnal Emissions, Cabaret Voltaire, Psychic TV, and
others who prided themselves on the televisual shock value of guerrilla
imagery. Record companies commissioned sanctioned videos by the Duvet Brothers for
MTV releases of such songs as Don’t Look Now by Torch Song, Just Wanna by
Blue in Heaven, and Big Decisionby That Petrol Emotion.

The term video jockey,
or VJ, emerged from "happenings," including acid tests by Ken Kesey and the
Merry Pranksters in 1965 and Andy Warhol’s infamous 1966 Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

Andy Warhol

Special New York city club nights, called the Andy Warhol Uptight,
at the Film-Makers Cinémathèque on West 41st Street, featured
a mashup of Andy Warhol films, dancing by Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick,
lighting by Danny Williams, and music by the Velvet Underground.

Barcode Andy Warhol portrait made with 2,160 barcodes from Campbell's Soup cans that were part of Warhol's iconic screenprints.

In his essay “The History of VJ,” Michael Heap describes
the event for us: "Andy, who was working one movie projector, now trained a
silent version of Vinyl, his interpretation of A Clockwork Orange . . . on the
screen. Superimposed on this by another movie projector run by Paul Morrissey
were close-up shots of Nico singing I’ll Keep It With Mine by Bob Dylan."

The superimposition of multiple slide projections, film
projections, and lighting effects combined to produce a mashup of visual
imagery designed to evolve avant-garde film—principally, the abstract visual
language of artists, such as George Barber, Ingo Günther, David Larcher, Viking
Eggeling, Hans Richter, and Oskar Fischinger, as well as the cutup films of
Bruce Conner.

Damo Suzuki performing with The Whole, visuals by Kosmik Klaus and his Solar Sea Slide Show

The mid-to late 1980s saw a wave of psychedelic-inspired
electronic dance music, including acid house and techno, that exploded onto the
pop scene. In the early electronica London music scene, many used acid-house parties to refer to what we
now call raves. During the 1970s and
early 1980s, the term rave was not
yet popularized; however, one intentional reference can be
found in the lyrics of the song Drive-In Saturday by David Bowie from the 1973
album Aladdin Sane, which includes
the line “It’s a crash course for the ravers.”

The word rave potentially owes its origin to an electronica music happening in 1967 at London’s Roundhouse,
the Million Volt Light and Sound Rave, an arts exhibit for electronic music and light shows created by promoters Binder, Edwards, and Vaughan. The 1960s technology of live psychedelic light shows spawned
an entirely new art form that is alive and well today. Using overhead
projectors with an emulsion of oil and dye sandwiched between convex lenses,
these psychedelic image generators created bubbling liquid visuals that seemed
to pulse in time to the music.

The lava lamp–styled projections were mixed with
slideshows and film loops to create an improvisational moving collage that
later evolved into video and film projections of a similar nature. The Million
Volt Light and Sound Rave event exhibited the only known public performance of
what has been described as an experimental sound collage that was created
exclusively for the occasion by Paul McCartney and John Lennon, reportedly
derived from experiments that were part of the initial Sgt. Pepper recording sessions. The work is known as the Carnival
of Light recording.

The phenomenon of acid-house parties ultimately led to a
cluster of music by the same name. The music genre known as acid house was popularized by such groups
as the Orb, Tetsu Inoue, System 7, Biosphere, and others. Acid house is a
child of the house music genre that features a hypnotic melody overlaid with very repetitive, trancelike sounds typically incorporating audio samples including snippets of conversations, single words or spoken narratives rather than lyrics. Many attribute the
birth of acid house as a musical style to a group called Phuture from
Chicago, Illinois, which employed the now-recognizable Roland TB-303 bass
synthesizer as a key element in the sound. In 1989, Paul Oakenfold started the
popular acid-house night at Heaven, a predominantly gay nightclub in London.

Oakenfold’s acid-house night was one of the very first
venues to feature a new take on projected visuals called ambient video,which
shares a strong evolutionary DNA with the 1960s psychedelic light shows. Unlike
the violent, shocking, fast-cutting, and multilayered imagery seen in scratch video,
ambient video or acid video is based
on op art; psychedelic animations; and Eastern religious imagery, such as Shiva
and Buddha; and, in the new
millennial decade, began to incorporate computer animation techniques,
frequently employing fractal images and 3D. A yellow smiley face is considered
the official logo or brand image identifying acid-house works and frequently
makes appearances in acid videos.

Rave soon went international, thanks primarily to the club
scene in Ibiza and the evolution of the goa-trance genre found in of one of my favorite destinations, the popular rave beach party scene in Goa, India.

In 1980, Richard Branson’s Virgin Group acquired Heaven.
Early on, Branson identified the marketing opportunity for what he referred to
as the pink pound, and the music
programming at Heaven featured a close tie to the Virgin music portfolio. In
1998, Heaven was refurbished as a mainstream nightclub to compete with other
clubs, such as Trade and the Fridge, all profiting from the flourishing
popularity of house music. In the early 2000s, Heaven evolved into a more
mainstream tribal house–and disco-based sound, but the various forms of scratch
video, acid video, and ambient video have survived and proliferated, and the
art form is now considered a core component of any well-appointed club.

There are innumerable examples of acid video and ambient video
creations to be found on YouTube, as well as appropriated video from other
related sources, such as visualizations and screensavers.

Visualizations and Screensavers .

The new
millennia decade has further evolved ambient video with its own defined
style of audio collages employing the club/DJ electronica style along with new
forms of animation, film, and computer-generated psychedelic imagery that were not
possible before the technology of the past ten years.

You’ll no doubt be familiar with software add-ons to
popular computer media-player applications, such as QuickTime, Windows Media
Player, WinAmp, and others that feature visualizations, or real-time software
animations that respond to the music to reveal bouncing, morphing, and
illustrative visuals that squirm and pulsate to the beat of your favorite song.

WinAmp has one of the best catalogs of visualizations,
including the works of Ryan Geiss, a full-time programmer developing various
next-gen game console projects for Microsoft and one of the core developers
of the human-tracking algorithms behind the XboxKinect. Geiss' visualizations, known as
plug-ins,such as Milkdrop, Smoke, and Monkey, have been downloaded by
more than eight million users.

A purer form of contemporary ambient visualizations is
found in what is commonly known as screensavers.
One of the best is called Electric Sheep, created and released as freeware by
Scott Draves in 1999. The name “Electric Sheep” is taken from Philip K. Dick’s
novel Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?

A typical view of the Mandelbrot Set.

The sheep are abstract visual forms best described as
colorful, geometric, animated, flowing patterns based on fractal flames, a particular algorithm created by Scott Draves in 1992, a version of the iterated function system class
of fractals originally based on fractal geometry, which is best illustrated by
visualizations of the Mandelbrot set.

Electric Sheep is a distributed computing project that
uses the sleep mode of your computer to render sheep (animations) and upload them back to
the server (the flock). Millions of sleeping computers running Electric Sheep are given a set of instructions, and each participating computer locally
renders individual frames of high-quality video and uploads them back to the
flock. The flock server assembles the individual frames together into short
movies (new sheep are born approximately every five minutes), and the finished
sheep in the form of .mpg video files are then distributed back to the
network using BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file-sharing application that is
included as part of the Electric Sheep application. The finished sheep animations
are displayed as screensavers on the participating computers.

Anyone watching sheep on one of the participating
computers can rate the sheep as good (happy sheep) or bad (upside-down sheep)
by hitting a key on the keyboard. The official website states, “The more
popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with
mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global
audience.” It is also possible to design your own sheep and submit them to the gene pool.
Entire communities of sheep designers have created sheep farms, breeding labs,
and wiki-style communities where users can direct an evolutionary process
dedicated to improving the design of sheep.

Also be sure to check out the tabTV playlist AmbieScratch that has many of the above works as well as many more not found here.